Children's oral language skills at the earliest stages of education are known to determine their success at school later on. Improving oral language skills is achievable through targeted intervention, and drama can be an effective intervention medium, but its potential has not been extensively evaluated to date. The present study piloted an…

The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of teaching intervention for Chinese learners, who were English speakers who tended to focus on phonemic awareness, in learning Chinese. It also tried to examine the impacts of Chinese phonological and morphological awareness on their English language development. The study was conducted in…

There are few published estimates of vocabulary sizes amongst students in tertiary education. Research does not offer estimates of the vocabulary size tertiary students might be expected to possess, though estimates exist for K-12 education, some EFL contexts, and the general population. Such research is important. For reading comprehension during…

Dual language learners are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. student population, and the majority speak Spanish as a first language. This graduate-level textbook--now in its third edition--gives future speech-language pathologists the comprehensive knowledge they need to work effectively with Spanish-English bilingual children and support…

This paper will deal, firstly, with the South African context, that cries out for attention to responsible language assessment. The renewed interest in language testing in South Africa is well illustrated in assessments of language ability for educational purposes generally, and more specifically in the assessment of academic literacy. Secondly,…

This study explored the effects of learning activities which encouraged positive crosslinguistic influence from L2 Spanish to L1 English grammar in young learners. The learners (N = 82) were studying Spanish as their compulsory foreign language at an English state primary school in the UK. As part of ten timetabled Spanish classes over a period of…

This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed…

Purpose: This study examines the narrative language and reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual students who received instruction with the Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) program, a narrative language intervention. Method: The main effects of the SKILL program were evaluated in a randomized controlled trial in which…

Purpose: The aim of this pilot feasibility study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the group VietSpeech SuperSpeech program targeting speech skills and home language maintenance via telepractice. Method: In Stage 1, using a case-control design, 30 Vietnamese-English-speaking children were assessed in English and Vietnamese, and parents…

We review cognitive-linguistic approaches to conveying meaning, sound, and orthographic information across scripts in order to highlight the impact of variability in written and spoken language on learning to read and to write words. With examples of word recognition and word writing from different scripts, including Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and…

Machine translation (MT) provides a seemingly accelerated alternative way to communicate in the target language (L2). A convenient service to the public, MT renders a potential disservice to language learners. In this pedagogically focused article, we show concrete and detailed examples of how language instructors can turn MT and other electronic…

In the history of reading research, numerous questions arise as educators and researchers ponder existing gaps in learning among English language learners (ELLs) striving to make meaning of the written word. Many scholars have investigated the impact of phonemic awareness, the phonetic code, and reading comprehension. As educators and researchers…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effect of bilingual narrative intervention on vocabulary gains in Hebrew (school language) and English (home language) among English-Hebrew bilinguals, using a block design (one language at a time), and to determine whether there was cross-linguistic transfer to the language that was…

Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with "wh"-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In this study we provide additional evidence of a S/O asymmetry in A'-dependencies from a novel source--sluicing. The results of our first…

Vocabulary plays a critical role in later reading achievement of emergent bilingual children (EBC) who are learning two languages. Given emerging vocabulary intervention research for EBC, we synthesize studies on vocabulary interventions designed for preschool and kindergarten EBC to provide the cumulative knowledge on the following dimensions:…